Workers Find Mysterious Letter Hidden Inside a Concrete Column at London’s National Gallery

When workers demolished two non-load-bearing columns at London’s National Gallery, they found a plastic folder stashed in the concrete. Inside was a letter addressed “to those who find this note.”

The missive had been neatly typed on stationary belonging to John Sainsbury, a member of the eponymous British supermarket dynasty. In 1990, Sainsbury and his two brothers funded a wing of the National Gallery. The letter read:

If you have found this note, you must be engaged in demolishing one of the false columns that have been placed in the foyer of the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery. I believe that the false columns are a mistake of the architect and that we would live to regret our accepting this detail of his design.

Let it be known that one of the donors of this building is absolutely delighted that your generation has decided to dispense with the unnecessary columns.

The letter was dated July 26, 1990—right around the time the column would have been built. It remained undisturbed for more than three decades, until crews found it during renovations in 2023. The discovery was first reported this week by the Art Newspaper’s Martin Bailey.

The Sainsbury Wing’s look has always been controversial. When the original designs were released in the 1980s, Charles III (then Prince of Wales) famously disparaged them as a “monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend.” Those plans were abandoned, and the museum instead turned to a pair of American architects, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Sainsbury was thrilled with their work—with one exception: He loathed a pair of non-load-bearing pillars in the gallery’s ground-floor foyer.

The architects designed the foyer to resemble the crypt of a church. The idea was that visitors would enter the gallery through a dark constricted space and find their way to a staircase; they would then emerge into brightly lit galleries full of beautiful Renaissance artworks.

“The crypt was a way of entering that prepared your eyes by graduating your vision through the sequence of what you saw,” Scott Brown tells the Art Newspaper. “The columns direct your movement through the darker, low-ceilinged crypt to the light-filled staircase.”

But Sainsbury didn’t see it this way.

“Although the architects got very excited about the sense of weight that the columns imparted to the ground floors, he was much more interested in the efficient use of space, clear sight lines and maximizing floor areas,” Sainsbury’s son, Mark, tells BBC Radio 4’s Mishal Husain. “He had no truck with the architectural conceit and saw it as a kind of unnecessary architectural affectation.”

Even as Sainsbury quarreled with the architects, his son imagines that he was also “keen not to turn it into a public spat.” That’s when Sainsbury’s brother—Mark’s uncle—arranged a compromise: The columns would stay, and Sainsbury’s letter would be preserved inside them.

The plan wasn’t a secret from everybody—Sainsbury didn’t tiptoe onto the site and covertly stash the note—but it was known only to a small inner circle. The idea was that it would become public if the columns were ever torn down.

That fateful day came last year, when the gallery began work on an £85 million renovation. These changes involved opening up the foyer space to accommodate larger crowds, as visitor numbers are much higher than they were in the 1980s and ’90s, per the London Times’ Emma Yeomans. As part of this effort, gallery director Gabriele Finaldi ordered crews to demolish the columns, at which point they found the letter.

Sainsbury died in 2022 at age 94. But his widow, Anya, donned a safety vest and hard hat so gallery officials could show her where the letter was uncovered.

“I was so happy for John’s letter to be rediscovered after all these years,” she tells the Art Newspaper. “I feel he would be relieved and delighted for the gallery’s new plans and the extra space they are creating.”

Free from the ill-fated column, the note will now be housed in the gallery’s archives. Mark tells BBC Radio 4 that his father would be pleased, but that he also wouldn’t gloat. He would express his triumph in a more subtle fashion.

“He was never one to say, ‘I told you so,’” Mark adds, “but he would raise an eyebrow and a wry smile that finally we’d all seen sense.”

Ellen Wexler | | READ MORE

Ellen Wexler is Smithsonian magazine’s assistant digital editor, humanities.